Classical - Dermot Clinch on Vivaldi

Cecilia Bartoli's Vivaldi Album is available in Sainsbury's in Clapham High Street. It is tucked away with Pavarotti's Pavarotti, Kennedy's Classic Kennedy ("If you liked Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, you'll love Classic Kennedy") and a compilation for the sensitive entitled Music for Wellbeing with Dr Hilary Jones. But don't make a special trip. Your neighbourhood branch may stock it. Maybe even your local record store will have gambled on a few for Christmas.

Antonio Vivaldi would surely like to know about his current popularity. The Four Seasons always did do him proud and he would be delighted to know that they are an optional ringing tone on mobile phones across the world. In later, less inspired years, if he needed to remind audiences of his originality, a quotation from the earlier work sufficed. On one operatic excerpt on Bartoli's Decca CD - a compilation of operatic excerpts - Vivaldi reuses "Winter" from the Four Seasons. The new context is an aria on the subject of parental infanticide.

Bartoli has done us a service. She has reminded us that Vivaldi exists beyond the concertos. And she has illustrated vividly, in unfamiliar repertoire, the scope of the Venetian composer's imagination. Who else would have introduced the puckish, improbable sonority of a psaltery - wooden hammers clattering on strings: the sound world of Harry Lime - into an aria of ice-cold resolution? Who else could have created those sequences of trite, infinitely touching chords lulling us into premature calm before the storm, or those high recorders twittering and intertwining above a song of unrequited love like winged cupids darting to and fro on a ceiling by Tiepolo?

Bartoli's mezzo voice is imperfect on her new disc; there is ha-ha-haing in the fast bits, over-emphatic raging in the fierce ones, in compensation, perhaps, for a decline in natural vocal strength. But her manner is so direct, the style of the fluffy, semi-quavery stuff so engaging, that she is very hard to resist. She is on Paul Gambaccini's Classic Countdown Sponsored by WH Smith with good reason.

Where Bartoli has bravely reassured us about Vivaldi in this pre-Christmas season, Anne-Sophie Mutter has bravely done the reverse. To the 97 complete versions of the Four Seasons listed in my (out-of-date) catalogue, she has added another. Two of the 97 were already hers, one with the Vienna Philharmonic, one with the Berlin Philharmonic, both with Herbert von Karajan. The one with the Vienna Philharmonic, we are reminded in a stilted conversation printed in the CD booklet, had a picture of Karajan on the cover with a red pullover draped over his shoulders. The music-making was a "good, heavy red wine" compared to her new version, which is the "popping of vintage champagne".

Who can say? On the cover of her new Deutsche Grammophon CD, Mutter crouches with a feral look in her eyes, while inside she swishes her hair coquettishly or composes her features sternly. The disc's fold-out packaging is itself as impenetrable and as excitingly colour-coordinated as a Rubik's cube. On a tender and serious note, just as Bartoli's CD was dedicated to her late brother, so Mutter has dedicated hers to her late husband. This melancholy trend just makes the critic feel extra bad.

Bad, fortunately, in this case about not much. Mutter's playing itself is hard to fault - even if the young Scandinavian string band that supports her tends to the brute and ugly in its attempt to appropriate the dramatic gestures of period instrument performance. Mutter intones duffly but descriptively in "Spring"; her smash-ride in the final Presto of "Summer" is furiously exhilarating; her timidity amid the snows of "Winter" - cushioned by a pizzicato rustle and ripple on the strings below - is exquisite, while the central largo of the same concerto is the soundtrack for all our imaginings of umbrella'd refuge and Nescafe'd cosiness. Vivaldi's eternal, ever-present tropes of country dancing, drunken cavorting, sea tempests and freezing winds melt away to allow the instrumentalist's singing line its central place: the composer at his least demonstrative and most affecting.

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